[taf2]

great write up. one thing to remember when traversing the DOM using native APIs whitespace matters.

e.g. <div>#textnode

    <span>#textnode</span>#textnode

   </div>

[antiufo]

Which can be safely ignored when using the firstElementChild, nextElementSibling properties and so on. They are not available in old browsers, but a polyfill should be available.